Social media giant Reddit has filed a federal lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI of illegally harvesting user-generated content to train and power its artificial intelligence products.
In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Reddit alleges that Perplexity worked with defendants SerpApi LLC, Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy to bypass its access controls and copy content from the social media platform’s website without authorization or a license.
“Reddit caught Perplexity red-handed by using the digital equivalent of marked bills (to use the bank robbery analogy) to track Reddit data and confirm that Perplexity was using Reddit data acquired through the scraping of Google SERPs. Perplexity knows that what it is doing is wrong because Reddit told it so in a cease-and-desist letter.”
The lawsuit claims Perplexity scraped vast quantities of Reddit posts, comments and discussions to train and operate its so-called AI-powered “answer engine.” Reddit adds that it sent a cease-and-desist letter in May 2024, demanding that Perplexity stop scraping its content or negotiate a paid licensing deal. The lawsuit says Perplexity denied that it was using the social media platform’s content to train its AI models and that it would respect Reddit’s directives not to scrape its data.
But Reddit claims Perplexity continued to get data from its platform and even increased the volume of citations by 40-fold.
Reddit accuses Perplexity and others of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and alleges that they engaged in unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy practices.
Says Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee in a statement,
“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content – and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy.”
The complaint seeks injunctive relief, monetary damages and disgorgement of profits. It also asks the court to prohibit the defendants from further accessing Reddit’s systems.
In a statement, Perplexity denied Reddit’s allegations.
“Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.”
Meanwhile, SerpAPI says it intends “to vigorously defend” itself in court. Oxylabs says it was “shocked and disappointed by this news, as Reddit has made no attempt to speak with us directly,” while AWMProxy could not be reached for comment.
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